The Day The Universe Changed and The Beginnings of the Quantum War
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
On one thing, the world’s outstanding authorities agree: Something Happened. When it happened, nobody is sure. How it happened, nobody is sure. That event was what started the continuum-spanning conflagration known as the Quantum War, or maybe it was what started it. Some attribute it to a weasel in the Large Hadron Collider, or the death of Lemmy Killmeister, or the uncertainty principle of the person in the Tomb of the Unknown Bowie collapsing upon its unauthorized opening. All of these were factors, as well as other stresses at that time, including the end of the greatest curse of the modern age. One factor, though, only received notice relatively recently, based on a single hair, a long-lost video feed, and a testimonial from one of the last surviving Zoetropes. Combined, the evidence points to an end of one universe, the expansion of another, and all with the silliest doomsday weapon of all time.
The fact that animal fur can collect truly impressive amounts of static electricity has been known (to humans, anyway) since the last ice age, and chinchilla fur, because of the number of hairs per follicle, is a veritable sink for static. Live chinchillas, as well as dead ones in the form of bedspreads and jackets, were a menace to many household electronics devices at the beginning of the 21st Century, with exceptional efforts to minimize bricking of essential equipment and devices developed throughout the subsequent decades. This, combined with the inherent baseline personality of captive chinchillas as “perpetual incoherent rage,” led some chroniclers of that period to suggest that the push in pet chinchillas in the 1990s Gregorian was an effort to accelerate and facilitate what was known as the “Y2K crash.” (Contrary to popular rumor, the Incas did not develop the analog storage devices known as “quipus” to avoid chinchilla sabotage: some evidence exists that chinchillas were in fact specifically bred and raised to find and shred quipu archives, marking this as one of the first examples of computer hacking and data corruption in the human record.) While efforts to make hardware and software chinchilla-proof or at least chinchilla-resistant continued for centuries after the time of St. Remedius Medical College, more effort went into declaring the living rodents as weapons of mass destruction than in what humans did with the rodents’ remains.
Any attempt to chronicle and research the cause and effects of the Quantum War run into the simple fact that the War broke out in all places and all times through the time-space continuum, collapsing into one event that coincides with St. Remedius’s disappearance. In the process, innumerable storage systems and methodologies instantaneously disappeared, mutated, and/or became obsolete at that microsecond of collapse, never to be available again. What remains are pieces and fragments, like bubbles of air under wallpaper, with many of those fragments making references or metaphors to other events that ended before they started. As such, one tantalizing fragment stands out, referring to the decommissioned Denton Nike Site in North Texas. Officially, the site was decommissioned in 1969 and leased to the University of North Texas in its ongoing efforts to absorb defense industry detritus for peaceful purposes. One project not on official books was conducted there through the 1980s and early 1990s, with a Texas Instruments site built nearby as cover for support facilities, of which no specifics remain, but speculation abounds on early quantum computer development. On January 1, 1990 Gregorian, as recorded on one surviving videotape of the main entrance of the facility, the facility was breached by ten individuals, affiliation and identity unknown but with known contact with several Zoetropes, all wearing “grey fur coats.” This was confirmed after they escaped, with one leaving a tuft of hair that analysis confirmed was of rodent origin and with the mult-strand follicular structure unique to chinchillas. Of that tuft, one single hair in a matching glass ampule entered the St. Remedius archives shortly before its disappearance. The motivations and maneuvers of the facility penetrators, the exact purpose of what is only referred to as “Battery B,” and exactly why they needed to wear chinchilla or chinchilla analogue fur may never be known. A disturbing hypothesis involves the hair being of lagomorph origin instead, suggesting that person or persons unknown are attempting or have succeeded at weaponizing pikas.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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